The Cochrane Collaboration and its contribution towards the management of allergic diseases

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is defined by David Sackett as ‘the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients’. In the last two decades there has been a paradigm shift in the way clinical decisions are made. This gradual shift has focused our minds more on critical examination and evaluation of the clinical evidence. As a result, nowadays less often we rely solely on content expertise, unsystematic clinical experience and intuition. In order to be practitioners of EBM, clinicians need good evidence, which is based on robust study design, is updated regularly and is easily accessible. The Cochrane Library has as its slogan: ‘The best single source of reliable evidence about the effects of health care’. So where is the Cochrane Library? and who was Cochrane? The Cochrane Library is not a place but an electronic database compiled by the Cochrane Collaboration.